Salesforce adds generative AI tools to Education Cloud

When OpenAI unleashed ChatGPT on the Internet, many college students used the generative AI tool to author papers on their behalf -- much to the chagrin of academia. But Salesforce's upcoming GenAI tools aim to enhance learning and academic support services.

In Einstein 1 Edition for Education, Salesforce later this year will roll out several prebuilt education-specific automations, including Intelligent Degree Planning, which shows a student's progress toward degree requirements and permutations for completing them. Pathway Templates, for advisors, generates plans for completing student degrees based on a student's major and planned graduation date.

Skills Generator compares employment marketplace demand with curriculum, designed to help create more workforce-ready graduates, and Einstein Mentorship Summaries organizes mentor programs.

Salesforce also plans to release Einstein Copilot Recruitment & Admissions Actions and Intelligent Question Generator for Student Intake. Both are designed to tap into generative AI to streamline the recruitment of students and personalize their onboarding into campus life by cutting hours -- or more -- out of current manual processes for schools, said Bala Subramanian, vice president and general manager of Salesforce Education Cloud.

The education-centric tools are part of Salesforce's GenAI push into vertical industries. Einstein 1 is a metadata platform that connects a user's data to Salesforce GenAI tools.

Universities need to mature their data models to take advantage of new GenAI tools to provide better services for students and improve learning outcomes, said Mitzi Lauderdale, Salesforce customer and vice provost for academic innovation and student success at Texas Tech University.

Analytics tools help Texas Tech's success specialists help personalize academic support for individual students. With the right end user education, policies and training around the use of generative AI -- keeping student privacy top of mind -- she believes the technology can further improve the student experience.

"In academia we have space issues, we have challenges with course scheduling," Lauderdale said. "We need to study the combinations of courses students are taking; are they more likely to persist if they are taking these four classes together instead of [those] four?"

Some educators wary of GenAI

On campuses, there's a range of reaction from administration and faculty to GenAI tools, said Kivanc Oner, Salesforce customer and vice president of transformation and CIO at the University of Las Vegas. The spectrum goes all the way from fear -- some professors ask for certain tools to be blocked on the network -- to enthusiastic early adopters.

"It is [IT leaders'] responsibility to internally have these conversations and understand the concerns, how we can respond to this, and what this means," Oner said. "We cannot hide from this. … We can be the leaders who say that we want to be part of this revolution, and this is how we want to be part of it."

Einstein 1 Edition for Education also opens access to Salesforce Data Cloud, which the company calls a "hyperscale data platform." Data Cloud can store data, or can access without ingesting it -- also called "zero copy" -- from other popular data warehouses such as Snowflake or Databricks.